How I Did It
Tools I Used
Drums: Native Instruments (NI), Battery
Brass: NI, Session Horns
Bass: Xfer Records, Serum (Quarkstar patch)
Breathy chords: Xfer Records, Serum (Quarkstar patch)
Piano: NI, The Maverick
Strings: NI, Session Strings
Double Bass: Ableton, Orchestral Strings.
Desk emulation: Sonimus, Statson
Console emulation: Airwindows, Console2
Equaliser: Tokyo Dawn, VOS SlickEQ
Vocals: Isotope, Nectar Elements
Reverb: Acon Digital, CM Verb
Chorus on second Brass and Vocals: Acon Digital, Multiply
Process
I tried to write this quickly so it was a cohesive composition and I wrote the framework of bass, chords, verse and chorus within 4 hours. The basic song was written in a day and I spent the next day completing the drums, balancing and removing quite a bit to make the music more immediate. The last parts were the mad piano solo towards the end and the ending. Like my painting, if I spend too much time on a piece I tend to have too many new ideas that don’t quite fit and I lose direction. This is the fourth tune I have written for healing and I deliberately left this one till I had 2 days to go, so I was under pressure to complete it.
Other Notes
Terry Pratchett had a rare form of early-onset Alzheimers and died recently. He is the author of a very funny and successful series of books and one of my favourite authors. His humour is humanitarian, but driven by a sense of what is fair and what is not. That sense of fairness underlies his work. As his close friend Neil Gaiman wrote : "He will rage, as he leaves, against so many things: stupidity, injustice, human foolishness and shortsightedness, not just the dying of the light. And, hand in hand with the anger, like an angel and a demon walking into the sunset, there is love: for human beings, in all our fallibility; for treasured objects; for stories; and ultimately and in all things, love for human dignity.” Terry Pratchett died on the 12th March 2015 of natural causes after his Alzheimers had reached a stage that he could not continue.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/24/terry-pratchett-angry-not-jolly-neil-gaiman
My own father is slowly changing with age and I am upset and angry to watch helplessly and see it happen. Also reading Kara Square's words and work about her father helped me too. The ccmixter Music for Healing has dug deep and empathically into difficult areas tapping into a wellspring of healing and compassion. I was at one time extremely ill and I remember the anger that I felt and turned to motivation to return to health.
Snowflake wrote a beautiful song, with strong meaningful words that has inspired many to write for it. With all of the above going through my mind I tried to capture a rage against how we feel about the unfairness of illness and old age. A positive emotion that we channel into creating changes for the better. I don’t have the ability to do this idea justice, but here is my attempt in music.
To match the words I also tried for a sense of degradation in the music, a suffocating of memories with periods of lucidity.
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